John Jantsch, founder of DuctTapeMarketing came up with a list of reasons why he would not buy a product. Your prospects and clients might feel the same way about your products and services.

Have a look at John's list and put that into perspective with your products and services:

1. Price
2. Package
3. Access
4. Payment
5. Quality
6. Training
7. Accountability
8. Design
9. Proof
10. Assurance

See 10 Reasons Why I Don't Buy From You (↑) for details.


Yours

John

The photo below shows an abandoned fishing village in China. Nature takes it back and eventually it will disappear altogether as if it never had existed.



This is a graphical reminder that marketing and advertising has to be an ongoing process.

Especially small businesses and freelancer make the mistake that they only do some advertising and marketing when the money slows down to roll in. On the other side big companies and corporations very often burn big budgets with ineffective, inefficient advertising.

In fact this is what you are supposed to do:

As money comes in always reinvest in marketing and effective advertising to further increase sales.

Don't worry, just continue to climb up the ladder.
Grow your email list(s), your sales, your social media following, eventually your presence in off-line media.

Some business owners are indeed afraid of to much business. But this is a problem that can be solved easily in most cases.

Contact me if you have these kind of issues.


Yours

John W. Furst


___
Image credit: Lockerdome.com (↑) The beautiful scenery of the village is captured by a Nanning based creative photographer, Tang Yuhong. He is taking us on the trip to this lost village on Goqui island.

Did you ever travel to a meeting with a prospective client and discover that you forgot to copy the file with your presentation to your notebook or to pack the CD or DVD?

Chances are good that you just answered that question with “yes”.

Nowadays it is rather simple to prevent something like that from happening. Just make sure your information is accessible in the cloud.

A service which I started using recently is FilesAnywhere.



Check it out: http://filesanywhere.com
Currently they offer a free plan which gives you 1GB of storage.

By the way I wrote a note on my facebook page last year about how I have moved my entire email correspondence to Gmail: Save Your Emails In The Cloud - Talking GMail


Talk to you later.

Yours
John W. Furst

Welcome to the 24th edition of email marketing tips on July 24th, 2010.

This edition is a little bit late; and it’s short. Enjoy.

editors pick

John W. Furst presents Getting to Know E-Mail Recipients - eMarketer posted at Articles - the latest Market Research, Internet Statistics - eMarketer, saying, “Personalization means more than just being on a first-name basis. E-mail marketers competing for attention in cluttered inboxes know that relevance and targeting will help get their messages read by consumers. While a personalized subject line can bring success, a survey of US and UK Internet users by e-mail marketing services firm e-Dialog suggests marketers must get to know more about their recipients than just a first name.”

general tips

Ian Lurie presents Marketing Sherpa’s 2009 Email Marketing Benchmark Guide posted at Conversation Marketing: Internet Marketing with a Twist of Lemon.

tools and services

Michelle Waters presents Aweber Tutorial: How To Add A Broadcast Message To Your Autoresponder Series posted at Michelle Waters Online Business Mentoring Blog.



That concludes this edition of email marketing tips. Past posts and future hosts can be found on my email marketing tips blog carnival home page.

Go on and check out the next edition: Email Marketing Tips - Edition 25.


Yours
John W. Furst

P.S.: If you like this edition, check out the previous email marketing tips - edition 23, too.

Technorati tags: email marketing tips, blog carnival

Welcome to the 23rd edition of email marketing tips on June 6th, 2010.

The carnival is back after having had some wild turbulence including this blog getting hacked three times during the last six weeks. I am traveling and the last thing I needed was someone taking out my blog. The guys from Blogcarnival.com lost patience with me and simply deleted the 21st edition which I had almost prepared for being posted. Shame on them.

Luckily a friend stepped in. Thanks to Pat Doyle, who hosted the 22nd edition of email marketing tips on her blog. Update in Feb. 2013: Unfortunately the blog has disappeared. So that edition is lost forever.

Now let’ start with today’s content.

editors pick

John Jantsch wrote The Right Way to Buy an Email List posted at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing saying, "I’m am not talking about buying or renting so called opt-in lists from list brokers. I’m talking about offering something of value as a way to motivate someone to willingly exchange their email address with you in order to receive your offers and additional contact."


Nick Moore wrote Better Email Newsletter Sharing on Facebook and Twitter posted at Inbox Ideas: Email Marketing Tips saying, "Social media is a big part of the marketing world these days. Most net-savvy businesses have a presence on Facebook and Twitter. That being the case, we’ve found that people are always looking for ways to make their social media and email marketing campaigns work together."


Chris Brogan wrote Stop Adding Me to Your Email Newsletter posted at chrisbrogan.com — Learn How Human Business Works – Beyond Social Media saying, "According to sources, it’s not illegal to add my name to your email newsletter list if you’ve done some kind of business with me in the past. Evidently, this means that it’s perfectly fine to add me to your list if you’ve sent me an email. Ever. Because I’ve gotta tell you: I’m subscribed to a LOT of email newsletters that I didn’t sign up for, and I’m not very pleased with it. To me, it’s spam, whether or not that’s the legal definition."


Carol Ellison wrote 8 Email Marketing Tips posted at destinationCRM.com - The leading resource for Customer Relationship Management - from the editors of CRM magazine saying, "Experts provide commonsense advice about ‘one of the most powerful and yet one of the most dangerous mediums of communication.’"

general tips

GreatManagement presents Avoiding The Pitfalls Of Internet Scamming posted at We Build Your Blog, saying, "Anyone who surfs the web on a regular basis can probably remember the very first time they fell victim to an attempted scam."


Sheryl Owen presents Top 10 Reasons to Use Snail Mail posted at Change of Address.


That concludes this edition of email marketing tips. Past posts and future hosts can be found on my email marketing tips page.

Continue reading the next email marketing tips - edition 24.


Yours
John W. Furst

P.S.: If you like this edition, check out the preceding email marketing tips - edition 20, too. Note: Edition 22 got deleted from the web. It was on a guest blog. Edition 21 was canceled.

Technorati tags: email marketing tips, blog carnival

Welcome to the twentieth edition of email marketing tips on April 7th, 2010.

We have a fine mix of submissions today so I did not add any external blog posts this time. Now it’s time to improve your email marketing campaigns. Let's begin.

This edition can keep you busy for some time. Here is how I want you to go about it.

• Get a piece of empty paper ready and a pen or use a fresh page in your journal.
• Draw a vertical line in the middle all the way from top to bottom.
• At top of the right column write the word “tip”, on top of the left column “to do”.
• Now when you read each article take a short note and most importantly write down what you will do as a result of that tip.
• Then of course do it. No excuses.

Today’s categories:

• strategy
• copywriting
• general advice
• tools and services

Browsing Tip: If not stated otherwise all links in this email marketing tips carnival edition will open in this window. Use the back button of your browser to come back here or open links in a new window or tab.

strategy

Jodi Kaplan presents How to Put Your Email Marketing on Automatic Pilot posted at Fix Your Broken Marketing, saying, “I promised to tell you how to market your services without lifting a finger. The secret…”

John’s comment: Solid advice! I suggest you sign up for her email class as well.

John W. Furst presents two articles at once. They go hand in hand: How Often Should You Email Your Subscribers and Are They Burning Their Email Lists?, saying, “The ‘old question:’ How often should I email my subscribers.”

John’s comment: My humble posts.

copywriting

Something must be up in the air this spring.

Too much is too much.
Really.

Last week I advised you to write more often to your email list members. This week it seems like I say exactly the opposite.

Many friends and colleagues are complaining that they are getting too many sales pitches in their email inbox. They are fed up and told me they have unsubscribed massively from the email lists of company A, marketer B, blogger C, and so forth.

Too Many Affiliate Promotions

The main culprit seems to be those affiliate promotions,

“He’s my friend, a great guy, his product rocks! This helped me so much when I was in the same situation like you are in right now. Really, it’s a steal, you are crazy if you don’t buy this now before it’s sold out. Buy it now, don’t wait!”

It continues the next day:

“I cannot believe that you are still sitting on the fence. You cannot let that go. It’s a once in a life time opportunity. And it’s so affordable. Imagine how you will feel when you finally get the results you and your family deserve.”

Seen in weight loss, make money, find the better job, learn X,Y,Z, …, you name it. C’mon.

And so on.

And once you start not opening and reading their emails, they figure that out and send you the same email again with a different subject line. And again, …

Companies and marketers are loosing customers that way all the time.

For example, a friend told me,

“He and … try to sell me something every day. It’s almost like they are whoring themselves out. If they concentrated on their own products and customer service - which is awful by the way - I think I would be more interested in them.”

I clicked Remove Me From List. Done.

Emotional Bank Account

As a marketing professional you have to understand this. You have an emotional bank account with your email list members and whenever you promote something to them, it will cost you points. You must ensure that your subscribers keep getting way more value from you over time than what you withdraw with every promotion you do. This balance should remain high and ideally continue to grow.

For example:

When Maria just has opted-in to your email newsletter or bought something from you. Think about:

• Does she really need this product right now.
• Can she take advantage of it?
• Does she need it?

It doesn’t make sense to promote an advance course to someone who just has bought your beginner product and normally wouldn’t even have finished to consume your program at this point.

… Webinars and Tele-Classes

Really? Webinars or tele-classes with special, free information are part of so many promotions today.

Honestly, how many time can one listen to the same “old story” over and over again. The content wears out quickly over time and what’s left is a 40, 60, 90 minute sales pitch,

That hurts a lot.

Costs many of those points in the emotional bank account you have with your email subscribers.

And even if your subscribers don’t watch the video, webinar or read the promotions, once the balance in that bank account is low, they start thinking that you want to steal their time and money. There goes your credibility as trusted adviser and friend.

This is not good.

Think about it.


Yours
John W. Furst

P.S.: There is a fine balance between sending too few and too many emails and it all has to do with the type of content you send along the way. I shall write more about this in the future.

Image source: Based on Playing With Fire, ©2009 by catsegovia/flickr. Modifications ©2010 by John W. Furst - Some rights reserved. - CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Welcome to the nineteenth edition of email marketing tips on March 23rd, 2010.

This is the first edition of my email marketing tips blog carnival this year. I have hand-picked all entries myself and hope that I will get useful blog article submissions to the next edition.

By the way: Here is the complete archive with highlight of the best contributions with useful email marketing tips.

Today’s categories:

• copywriting
• general tips
• practical tips

Browsing Tip: If not stated otherwise all links in this email marketing tips carnival edition will open in this window. Use the back button of your browser to come back here or open links in a new window or tab.

copywriting

Sonia Simone wrote The Betty Crocker Secret to Email Marketing that Works posted at Copyblogger, saying, “You’ve heard it a thousand times: the money’s in the list. If you’re serious about getting results online, you need to build a list of people who are paying attention to you, typically an email list.”

John’s comment: A must read article! I only have one objection: “The money is not in the list! It’s in the relationship with the list.”

Doberman Dan wrote David Deutsch’s Advice To Copywriters posted at Doberman Dan - Direct Response Entrepreneur, saying, “At John Carlton’s Action Seminar David Deutsch shared several life-changing pieces of advice with me. David is one of the handful of top “A list” copywriters… the very best hired guns who write for the HUGE direct response companies like Boardroom, Agora, Rodale and Phillips.”

John’s comment: With that tip you actually can earn while you learn. Doesn’t matter if you get started with direct mail or you simply start to build an list of your own.

general tips

I just wrote a short forum reply for a friend on Triiibes.com who had asked,

“How can I increase the open rate of my newsletter?”

Here it is, I am sharing it with you.

A good point in time to deliver another email marketing tip after having stopped that series of articles for some time. Maybe I should revive the carnival? I have to think about it and check how many spam submissions I have received in the meantime. Well, I am preparing a guide, a tutorial for email marketing anyway.

The business in question is a European based specialist for colors trends and consults with designers in fashion, home design, …